Michael: Elsom, I want to thank you for taking the time to talk to HMA marketing consultants from all over the world and I am really glad that I contacted you and I am glad that I was able to find this archive presentation that you did on positioning yourself as the obvious expert.

Can you briefly tell the HMA consultants why positioning yourself as the obvious expert and why they should listen to this presentation here that we are about to forward to them?

Elsom: Michael, the reality is that all of your consultants are expert in their own right and they know that, but the world doesn’t know that about them. Whatever their speciality is, they really want as huge of an environment and network of people around them as possible to recognize that they are what we call, each of them is what we call the obvious expert in their speciality so that they will attract folks calling them on their niche. Now by doing the areas that we discuss in the interview, starting with one, two, or three of them. There are a dozen different strategies, they will become known as the go-to person for whatever their speciality is. We have just found that being known that way has the potential of building an empire very quickly.

Michael: What does this mean for the consultant when they position themselves as an obvious expert in their consulting practice as compared to out there hustling consulting projects or services?

Elsom: All the difference in the world because all of a sudden instead of spending your time trying to market, market, market then you have people calling on you because you are recognized as the go-to expert. When you follow these strategies, people will start sharing your name around as the main person to go to, to accomplish whatever they want that you can help them do. I was where you are now. I was struggling with whatever I did to market myself as a consultant after I got to California. I was passionate about what I was trying to get across. I was passionate about trying to help people and it wasn’t working until I got some help and literally found the way to change my consulting business. You are about to hear my story step-by-step as to how I built it from zip to a very, very successful consulting business. I think we are doing it.

Michael: So for the consultants listening now, we are going to take you right into Elsom’s story, right now enjoy.

Elsom: There are so many ways to get yourself positioned as the obvious expert without having to brag about yourself. Just get out and do things and people will realize that you are the expert, the obvious expert.

Good evening everybody and it is good to be here as well. I want to thank you for joining the call. The topic tonight is how to position yourself as the obvious expert. The reality is that we are all experts at something. Many of us are experts in many different areas. Just because we are experts and we have different kinds of expertise, it doesn’t mean that others recognize that or know enough to give us a call or know enough to think of us whatever that area is. So the goal is to find a way or maybe multiple ways to position yourself so that whatever your area of expertise that your potential clients, your potential prospects, your potential buyers will in fact think of you as one of the first names that comes to mind whether it is buying positioning or whatever it is.

I first learned about this when I was teaching at California State University in Fresno. I really wanted to add to my potential revenue by somehow becoming a consultant in the area that I thought that I was an expert in, which was at that time the area of testing and creating tests that students would feel good about taking, helping teachers create tests that would create the kind of information that I needed and actually encourage, in a way, students to go forward in whatever area they were in.

So testing and testing assessment was the arena that I thought that I could make a serious contribution in. While I was trying to market myself as a testing assessment and testing creation consultant and I did a beautiful brochure. It was a gorgeous brochure. It had a beautiful, wonderful picture of me on it that just really got the word out about the school system and that the school district was getting involved with understanding the whole testing process better, building more revenue potential for them from the federal government, from the state government, all possibilities. I put out the brochure. I understood from some marketing books to get the brochures out really explaining who you are and what you are doing. I spent some kind of serious money printing those brochures, mailing them out, several thousand dollars just to develop some kind of business; a side business to go along with a teaching business that I was doing. The results were so disappointing. I mean thousands of dollars out and less than a thousand dollars in. When you do the math this is not good.

So I was doing other things. I was playing the organ at the Episcopal Church in order to raise more money to keep this marketing going. In fact, I made the decision; all right these brochures aren’t working yet. Obviously what I need to do is send out more brochures. You know the definition of insanity. Do the same thing again and expect a different result that is the definition of insanity. Anyway not knowing any better, I sent out an equivalent number of brochures all over again. The results were the same. At this point I am now doing magic shows with my son for kids’ birthday parties to keep raising money to keep doing marketing trying to build this sidebar consulting business.

Since it wasn’t working, I happened to hear about a man by the name of Howard Shenson. Now, Howard Shenson has done a lot of research in the arena of building consulting practices. He put out a number of programs. He happened to be teaching for the same University system that I was except that he was in the Hills California area. I went down to visit him after making an appointment and I showed him the brochure. I explained to him, “Mr. Shenson, what I need is I need you to help me figure out what to do with this brochure so that I can attract a number of clients, so that I can earn extra revenue while I am teaching.” You don’t get paid all that much as an adjunct teacher in any university, so it was desperately needed. Howard Shenson took a look at the brochure and said, “Well, we need to do something different than the brochure.” I said, “Mr. Shenson, wait a minute the problem is that I really need you to help me figure out what to do with the brochure so that I can attract clients and get people in. I have been sending out a lot of them and we just haven’t gotten hardly any response. I need you to help me figure out what we do with this brochure to get the response.” He once again said, “We have to do something different than use this brochure.” I said, “Mr. Shenson, I have a lot of these brochures still in my garage. I need to get them out.” He said, “The problem with using a brochure in your particular situation is that the people you are sending these brochures to.” In that case we were talking about the Superintendent, Guidance Counselors, Board of Education, and various kinds of folks in the educational world that could consumably use my services.

He explained that one of the problems that we had was that sending these brochures out to these folks, each one of them almost to a person had a gatekeeper. The gatekeeper happened to have a cylinder very near their desk and what was happening to the brochures was those brochures were finding their way into those cylinders called wastebaskets at the gatekeeper’s desk. They were not getting anywhere. Well that did make some sense to me, but I didn’t know what to do with it at that point. He quickly followed up and said, “Let me ask you this question. Have you ever thought about writing a book?” Well, yeah. I have thought about writing a book. He said, “Well, when do you think you are going to write a book in this area that you are an expert in?” I said, “Well, just as soon as I have all the information that I can possibly gather in order to make this one of the best books ever in the whole area of testing and assessment.” Howard Shenson said, “Dead people don’t write books.” There was a message there because I could wait forever until I finally have all of the information that would possibly be available in order to get a book written.

Then what happened was he said, “Look, we have an appointment set for another week from now. One of the things that I would like you to consider doing is think about putting together an outline on what this book might be all about.” Then he asked, “What specific area do you think that you might write a book about that you have been doing some work in lately?” I shared with him that I had been working with my daughter Beth on How to get a High Score on the SATs and that I had been working on developing strategies for scoring higher on just that, Scholastic Aptitude Tests. He said, “That’s it. Let’s start there.” What he suggested was to go ahead and create some notes on the specific strategies that you have come up with for getting higher scores on the math part and then other strategies on the verbal section. Then create sample exercises for each of them and then creates a complete sample exam with annotated answers and we will put that into what we will call a book. What I would like you to do is, you are meeting with me one week from today. Take all of the information that you can gather about what you have been working on, put it down, and type it up and bring it in to our next meeting. What I explained was the problem is that I was still teaching at the University, I have this job playing organ at the church, and I still have some of these children’s magic shows, birthday party shows that I am doing. He said, “Look is there any time that you have ever really had to just immerse yourself in a project of some kind? Really sort of get yourself so involved that this has to get done, that whatever it takes you get it done.”

Elsom: I said, “Yeah. I have gotten involved with that at one point along the way.” He said, “If you want to really get involved in consulting and start attracting attention and getting clients, then you don’t have a choice. You have to do something. So, here is the deal. If you want to come to the next appointment, if we are even to have another appointment, then I need you to go ahead and do this assignment before I see you next week or there is no point in our getting together again.” It’s love. That is what it felt like and that is what it was.

I went home with an idea in mind and went to work. When I next got to see Mr. Shenson in his office, I noticed on the desk in front of him there was a stack of sheets of paper, but actually it was more like index stock, I guess. On the cover, on the top, it said Strategies for Scoring Higher on your SAT, but there was also Junior National Test Preparation Center. I said, “What is that? National Test Preparation Center?” He said, “That is your new publishing company. Your new publishing company.” That impressed me. I had to go over the pages, about 200 pages both sides, type written with electric typewriter. Remember the electric typewriter and I had typed up exactly the kind of format that Howard Shenson had suggested. He took those pages with me and we went to a copy shop, kind of like the Kinkos of today. We printed 200 copies both sides of the pages that I had brought to him. Then we went to another service bureau to what turned out to be the covers of the book, these index sheets that I just mentioned. He had those; I guess it is called perfect binding, wrapped around the pages, which had been copied. All of a sudden, I had in my hands a book. It smelled like a book, felt like a book, it was a book, a book, Strategies for Scoring High on the SAT.

I was impressed with the fact that I had this book. I guess that I began wondering okay so there is a book now. There was nothing new about me. There was nothing better about me. There was nothing more that I knew knowledge wise with this book in my hand than there had been two months before. There was nothing different about my ability to consult or anything else. There was just this addition of a book, a book that wasn’t all that professional, but it was a book.

I said, “What do I do with this?” Howard Shenson said, “Here is my recommendation. You know the people that you have been sending the brochures to. My recommendation is that you send this book out to each of them with a cover letter. First of all behind the back flap of the book, go ahead and put a list of the consultant services that you have and how to get hold of you. Then you put a cover letter that says. Dear Mr. Guidance Counselor, or Principal. Here is a copy of my latest book How to Score Higher on your SAT, which I believe will be of tremendous use for your teachers and students who are looking to score higher. I am happy to send it to you with your compliments. Sincerely Elsom Eldridge Jr., Educational Consultant.

Well, Mr. Shenson said, “This is one thing that most people do when a book arrives. They do not throw it away. They don’t throw it away. In other words when the book arrives it is likely to get in the hands of somebody who cares about the topic. So I wound up using that book, if you will, as a brochure. When you have a book with your name on it and your expertise identified in the title, you are now what we call the obvious expert. People now begin to recognize you as someone that knows a lot perceivably as to whatever the topic is. I became known as the obvious expert, if you will, in the area of testing and assessment and immediately changed my life in terms of beginning to get call from potential clients, potential prospects. It was almost miraculous. So in a sense, I guess, I was using the book as my new brochure if you think of it that way. Helping to elevate the consciousness belief system of those who were receiving it that I was the guy, I was the go-to person as far as testing and assessment goes.

So I suggest to you that one of the areas that you might want to consider in order to position yourself as the obvious expert in whatever field you are in would be to write a book and self publish the book. At least get it out there. Some people say, “Well I don’t know if I want to put a book with all that information that I have in it because then people might not want to hire me because they will have all the information in the book. The reality of that particular situation is that I often ask back, “What is it that people don’t want to do for themselves?” The answer actually is that most people don’t want to do anything for themselves. If they can find an expert that would do it for them, they will go ahead and hire that expert or get involved with the expert if they truly believe that that is the obvious expert. So that is part of it.

If you have a piece of paper in front of you, in fact let me suggest that you get a piece of paper in front of you. You write some letters down on the left hand side. At the top of the page the first letter that I recommend is B. Let’s just go through that. There is a piece of paper in front of you. Leave some room on the left side of the paper. We are going to come down with a dozen letters with the top letter being B. I am going to go ahead and give you the rest of the letters. The next letter coming down the left side is R. The next one is A. Follow that with an N. Follow that with a D. Keep coming down with I. Underneath I is N, then underneath that is G, underneath that is U. Keep coming down with an N, then an O, and then a W. Reading down it says Branding You Now.

This is sort of like a dozen steps that will help anyone position themselves as the obvious expert. Positioning is important. Just being the expert, knowing you are the expert, isn’t enough. You have to let people know. You want to let people know in sort of a quiet way, not running around saying, “I am the expert.” The more you can have people making the decision on their own, the more of an expert you actually appear to be, actually the more an expert you are. So right next to that letter B write the word, books because that is one of the areas. Creating a book, publishing a book, self publishing a book that is a very key part to getting yourself positioned as the obvious expert.

People say, “Wait a minute. Writing a book, a whole book, that is a lot of work.” Yes it is. So maybe you don’t start with a book. Maybe you start thinking what the book would have in it. Let’s say you want to put 12 chapters, whatever the area of your expertise is. What are the 12 problems that people have that you have a solution for that you could write about. What 12 chapters would be in your book? Just make a list. Make a list what those 12 chapters would be, 1 through 12. Instead of starting with the book itself because creating a whole book is a challenge, but let’s sort of make that into a micro-task instead and think in terms of 12 different chapters and instead of a whole book what is chapter 1? Whatever the title is, whatever the problem is that you are solving, create a report. A report that says whatever it is, again with your name as the author. Putting out a 16, 32-page report with your name on it that also positions you as what, as the obvious expert.

What if you set yourself a goal of doing one report a week? Take longer, do one report a month. Use a one report a month concept. At the end of 12 months, having done 12 reports and mailing them out and having them available online or having them available to your clients, with those 12 reports at the end of that time frame, you have what? You now have the content of your first book. That is a very, very negotiable way in your own life to make this happen. Every time we present this particular program, we usually get within 6 months, 7months several people sending us copies of the book that they have now created.

So consider do that. By the way you know the R, the second R has to be. Write report next to that. If a report sounds too much of a challenge right now, could you do a short article? A brief article, now we are going to take each chapter and let’s break that into two or three topics, two or three problems that you can write about with a solution. Those articles can now be sent into journals, trade journals, magazines, or published in your own e-zines making these articles available. Out of these articles, these articles become reports, three or four articles become a report, and 12 reports become a book.

So the A stands for article. Now, how do you get articles into print? You can either print them yourself or send them out to clients or prospects, put them into your own e-zine, send them out for printing in other e-zines; get them into the world with your contact information at the bottom. Once again positioning yourself as the expert in the specific arena that you were trying to get business in. After I had the books, believing hardships, I was back in the car driving back toward Fresno. He had said, “The next thing I would like you to do is go ahead and put out a newsletter in the whole testing assessment area. Send the newsletter out to the same prospects that you have had before; the people that you want to have as clients.” These days it is a newsletter or an e-zine. I want to go back to the book for a minute. E- books are fine, books – trade books are better in terms of positioning yourself as the obvious expert. Now that there is print on demand, you can print a book at a time for $5 or $6 one-by-one. There are companies now that will print and ship it for you for under $10. You don’t have to print a thousand or 500 books to have a trade book printed out, sent out, looking beautiful, with your title and your name on it.

Back to the newsletter, Howard Shenson said, “I would like you to put together a newsletter on testing and on assessment.” I said, “Okay, how often should I send it out?” He said, “That is up to you, but go ahead and send it out as often as you would like.” So I created this first newsletter on testing and assessment and set it up compliments of myself. Once again, if you write a book you are the obvious expert. If you write a report you are the obvious expert, if your name is identified with articles you are the obvious expert, if your name is identified as the editor or publisher or author within a newsletter, you are the obvious expert on whatever your newsletter is.

So I started sending out these newsletters to the same prospects. I made one error and that was that I indicated that the newsletters were becoming out monthly. About two months later, I received a couple of letters asking when they were going to get their second newsletter. What had happened in the interim is that I had begun getting business. I had begun having to do some consulting. It was working, but I let some things get ahead of me. I had not kept up with getting the next issue of the newsletter out. That was a lesson to me. In other words when you make a promise, you have to keep the promise. I hadn’t been able to. I quickly sent out a notification how we were making the newsletter larger and we were going to be issuing it every quarter at that point.

So, my advice, when you put out a newsletter or these days an e-zine; we didn’t have e-zines when I was doing this, however you put it out, don’t over promise. Don’t say it is going to be monthly if it is going to be quarterly. Don’t say that it is going to be weekly if it is going to be monthly. My accountant puts out a newsletter and he puts at the top of it, “This newsletter will be sent out to all of our clients on an irregular basis.” You don’t even have to make a promise, but whatever you put in there, stay on top of it. Another quick tip on that is if you put out newsletters, if you put out a physical newsletter that is as opposed to an e-zine; if you put out a physical newsletter then three-hole punch it. That increases the retention of the newsletter by 15% because they think they are supposed to hold onto it and keep it.

Okay, so we have books, we have reports, we have articles, ads, and we have newsletters. Once I left the office again having been back to see Mr. Shenson, he gave me the next piece of advice and that was that I should get involved in doing lectures and talks for service clubs. Service clubs being like Lions, Kiwanas, and Rotary. Those are the service clubs. He said, “Why don’t you go ahead and put together some kind of lecture that you can offer to service clubs because it is a win-win situation. When you can do lectures for service clubs, you are going to there for free. You get to see from anywhere from 25 to 100, sometimes as many as 200 people in an audience where you become known as the obvious expert because you are the person delivering a talk on the area of your expertise.

So when I got back into the Fresno area, I saw this big billboard on the side of the road. It basically said welcome to Fresno and there were 12 different icons on this billboard talking about the different service clubs and where they were held, when they were held, and what day they were held. I pulled to the side of the road and I wrote down the name of each club and where the club meeting was. It even said what restaurant the meetings were being held in. When I got back to the house, I sat down and started trying to figure out how do I do this next? What do I do now?

I called the restaurants that they meetings were held at and I asked them, “Tell me how I get a hold of whoever is in charge of the rotary club meetings that you have there on Tuesday afternoons.” They gave me a contact person and told me how to do that. I started calling and usually they were the presidents of the clubs or the vice-president of the club. I started calling these people. I said, “Hi, my name is Elsom Eldridge, Jr. and I have been working on a new lecture just for rotary clubs and the title of it is How to Succeed in Every Test That You Take in Life. That was a very interesting experience for me because I discovered that they were interested in having almost anyone come and talk. Some of them said, “Can you send me any information or any literature?” I said, “Absolutely.” In my own mind I was thinking just as soon as I pull it together and create it. I will send it to you. A couple of the clubs were no longer there. They had sort of merged into other clubs. One of the clubs people said, “Can you do the lecture next week?” I have to explain, when I was talking to the president, the presidents don’t usually handle the booking of the lectures, the bookings that they were going to have for the meetings. They sent me on to the program chairperson of the month of that particular time frame. I was able to call the program chair person and say, “Your president asked me to give you a call about this particular new talk just being introduced to the Rotary club, the Kiwanas club, or whatever the club was that I was talking to.” The chairperson says, “Can you do it next week? I don’t have anyone there.” I said, “Let me check my book.” I went and looked at the book. Of course, I knew it was wide open. I then had to in my mind, put together how am I going to do this. I, of course, came back on the phone and said yes. Of course we can do it. You know sometimes you sort of put your back against the wall to do what you need to do in sometimes an impossible time frame. That is exactly what happened. This was one of the most incredible ways, when I was trying to build a local business. Not necessarily just a local business, we will go into that in a minute. When you are trying to build a local business one of the fastest ways to get known as the obvious expert is to get out into the world of meetings where people invite you to be the speaker and the investment of time in doing the talk.

Now there is an important piece of additional information you need in order to make this work as well as possible. Number one, you need a really good title for whatever the talk is going to be so that the members of the talk are going to want to attend the meeting and hear you. Number two; you need to have an introduction card for yourself. That is not modest at all. Where you are introduced as the expert in whatever your field is so that as the chairperson reads the introduction card, the people who are in the audience get to understand that you are the main person in this particular area of expertise. The first talk that I did, I didn’t know that. The chairperson got up and said, “Now let me introduce Elsom Eldridge.” Nothing – flat. I got up and did my dance, did my talk, but I learned a very valuable lesson from that particular experience. Take a card that explains to the chairperson in enough of a format what he can say to introduce me, word-for-word.

The next piece, we need a great title, we need an introduction card and then I recommend you also have what I call a bait piece; b-a-I-t, a bait piece. That is, picture in your mind an 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper folded in half and on the front half the title of your talk. Then if you open it up you now have page 2 and page 3 in like a folder. On pages 2 and 3 I recommend that you would have an outline of your talk leaving blank spaces for people to fill in words, have some of the words in place. Then blank spaces for people to fill in some of the words so that they want to keep it, they will keep it. It will increase it’s retention value for you. Then on the back page, which is page four, is all your contact information and possibly a free report, a way to reach you, a way to get your e-zine, a way to get a free tape. Whatever you want to give away making sure that they have a reason to want to get in touch with you. The advantage of them having this piece with their having written on it as opposed to a calling card or as compared to a brochure is with their having in participating in creating it, it is far more likely that they will hold onto it and be able to find it when they think of you and need your expertise in whatever way it might come to pass in the future. I discovered a change in the 1% response to 14% response once I moved over to having the bait piece. By the way, we have books, we have newsletters and you are probably wondering what that D is? D is delivering lectures, delivering lectures or talks.

Now, back when we were doing this information before, we didn’t have the Internet. I have added the Internet as the “I” because there are so many possibilities on the Internet in terms of what you can obviously; it makes you the obvious expert. The more information that you have available in important ways you are the obvious expert. People can see you as the obvious expert and that is another important piece.

The “N” stands for networking. That means getting out and having people know who you are, helping other people get business. Letting people not only know who you are, but as you help other people get business they will remember that you helped get them business. The genie is for giving, giving back to the community. The more you prosper, the more that you want to give back. It just works out that way. The more you give back to your community, to your universe, the more that will come your way.

Next is the “U”, U stands for USP, Unique Sales Proposition. You need to stand out. You need to differentiate yourself. Whatever position you are as an expert, and you have had many discussions about this already, you need to create your own positioning so that you are different from the other expert who was in the same business that you are in.

The next letter is “N” for newspaper. In parenthesis you might want to write the word “media”. Get the word out. Send out press releases about everything that you do. If you have a new client come on board, if you write a new book, if you send out a new report, if you stop publishing a newsletter, send out to the media information about everything that you do. When you are mentioned in the media, every time that someone sees you, you become known as the obvious expert. If the eyes were open, what would I say? I would say that we are the obvious expert. Somebody said to me, “Will everything that I send out like that get published?” Well, no, of course not. Everything doesn’t get published, but if you don’t send anything out then nothing gets printed or put on the radio or on TV. You want to get as many interviews on the radio and TV in your area of expertise as well.

The “O” stands for organizations. Our strategy here is to suggest that you join some specific organizations, especially where your potential clients come to see or other people that are in your speciality are also members so that you can help refer to each other potential clients. Now in order to be known as the obvious expert as regards to being a member of an organization, then what you want to do is get involved. Take a leadership role, ask how you can help, whatever that you can do to help in the organization, you will now become known to the other members. The more that you do in that particular area, the more of an obvious expert you are positioned. Then we have workshops and seminars. Whoever is leading a seminar, whoever is leading a workshop, whoever is in the front of the room is what, the obvious expert. When you send out a brochure with your seminar indicating that you are leading the seminar, well what are you at that point? You are the obvious expert.

Sometimes in one of the traveling seminars that we do when we are talking about positioning you as the obvious expert or how to become a consultant, those are the two seminars that we travel with, I will stop at one point. I will say who in the room, let’s say that I have four people in the room. Who in the room would like to make $10,000 in one day and let’s say in four or five weeks from now? Well, almost everybody puts their hand up in the room; of course because that sounds good. Well, if you think about it, if you can get a certain number of people to attend a seminar, and let’s say that they charge $95 for that seminar. How many people do you need to get in the room to make $10,000? Maybe it’s $5,000; maybe it’s $1,000. Whatever it is that you set as a goal, you can get people in a room without spending too much money in marketing these days, and without spending too much money in fulfillment, that is in terms of running it.

You can also do this in construction with organizations like “The Learning Annex” or “The Knowledge Shop” at Community Colleges where they will do the promotion for you and split the revenue with you. The advantage from a marketing point of view and from a revenue point of view is whether you are doing a seminar or a workshop and you are perceived as and deliver the goods as the obvious expert, then it also gives you the opportunity to bring to the party audio tapes that you have created, books that you have already written. By the way when I talked about books before and reports and articles, well those all transfer to audiotapes and videotapes as a potential product as well. When you are talking about books, reports, articles, newsletters, delivering lectures, going on the Internet, networking, USP, newspapers, organizations, workshops and seminars, the more of those that you put in play, the more you are positioned as the obvious expert.

A friends of ours, Doug Hall, wrote a book, one of the best books of marketing that I think is out there. I asked Doug Hall, “If you were to recognize that somebody was an obvious expert, what would you take into consideration as your belief and your belief system that this person is the obvious expert?” Doug Hall said, “I think what I would look at is the type of body of work.” Think about that in conjunction with what I just said. Doug Hall wrote the book called Jumpstart Your Business Brain. My recommendation therefore is a body of work, looking at the various things we have talked about, much of that applies become the obvious expert by doing as many of these particular items as you can comfortably begin. It doesn’t matter what you start with, just start with something and position yourself as the obvious expert.

If you will go to obviousexpert.com/free there is a short report on the obvious expert itself. That is o-b-v-i-o-u-s, expert – e-x-p-e-r-t dot com, forward slash free. I recently put out a book called How to Position Yourself as the Obvious Expert. You will see what that book is all about when you go to obviousexpert.com/free.

I want to give you a quick idea. If you want to create a book and you want to get a number of other people to help you and get the book done, I found an interesting way when I created this book and accomplished more than I ever expected to get. So, How to Position Yourself as the Obvious Expert happens to have 150 incredible contributors to this book, 150 true experts who gave me antidotes, stories, and more ideas for each chapter. There are 12 chapters in the book. It was truly good that this happened because just as I was getting down trying to finish up the book, I had a stroke, literally a stroke. Fortunately a small stroke, but a stroke none the less. That slowed me down for a little while as you can imagine. If you want to see how I got other people involved, you might want to take a look at obviousexpert.com/submit. You will see the strategy that I used in order to invite people to contribute to that book. I give this to you as just another idea as a way to get, hey if you can’t get the book out soon enough or you want to get other people involved in working with you, then that is one technique to make things go faster.

Another way to position yourself as the obvious expert is to find another expert to write a book with. For instance, I did a book in conjunction with the great Dan Kennedy, In the World of Marketing, No One Greater and a book on how to build a six-figure consulting practice by Dan Kennedy and also the junior. I am positioned as a what, as an obvious expert because I am tied into Dan Kennedy because we did the book together. There are so many ways to get you positioned as the obvious expert without having to brag about yourself. If you just get out and do things then people will realize that you are the expert the obvious expert. Feel free to go over to www.obvious- expert.com.